The advent of set-top boxes and other media content access devices has provided users with access to a large number and variety of media content choices. For example, a user may choose to experience a variety of broadcast television programs, pay-per-view services, video-on-demand programming, Internet services, and audio programming via a set-top box.
Such media content access devices have also provided media content providers with an ability to present targeted advertising to specific users or groups of users. For example, several parallel advertisement streams may be transmitted by a video head-end or other media content delivery device during an advertisement break in programming. A media content access device may be configured to switch to one of the advertisement streams that is deemed most relevant to a user of the media content access device.
However, a head-end may at times fail to include one or more advertisements within an advertisement stream transmitted to a media content access device. Such a failure may result in blank content (e.g., a black screen) being presented to a user of the media content access device.